The cloud computing environment is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further abstracted by a cloud layer, thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical compute engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices.
Corporate and/or enterprise systems customers often make server purchase decisions based on the number of processors, size and speed versus cost, effective implementation, and/or usage parameters. In evaluating new server solutions, customers frequently consider processor numbers and speed as the key decision factors for accomplishing workload. Currently, operating system or application-based utilization tools are used to measure system and processor utilization. Output provided by these toos may then be graphed, statistically analyzed, reported, and correlated back to the original purchase criteria. However, in many complex environments, such as those surrounding networked (e.g., cloud) computing installations, these measurements may be insufficient, and additional functionality is needed to ascertain whether the server decision is correct for the system implementation and application load running on the server infrastructure.